Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.

Saturday, 2 February 2013

Rabbi Ephraim Padwa, who is leader of the UK’s Strictly Orthodox Jewish community, told the alleged victim that it was “mesira”, or forbidden, to report a suspected Jewish sex offender to a non-Jewish authority

A senior British rabbi has been filmed telling an alleged victim of child sexual abuse not to go to the police.

Rabbi Ephraim Padwa, who is leader of the UK’s Strictly Orthodox Jewish community, told the alleged victim that it was “mesira”, or forbidden, to report a suspected Jewish sex offender to a non-Jewish authority.

His advice, which was secretly recorded as part of a Channel 4’s Dispatches investigation to be shown tonight, will reignite the controversy about the cover-up of child sex abuse by religious groups following global scandals surrounding the Roman Catholic church

Strictly Orthodox Jewish people, known as Charedi, number 40,000 people, around a sixth of the Jewish population in Britain.

Rabbi Padwa, who is head of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations in Stamford Hill, north London, was recorded by a former member of the tight-knit community using a hidden camera.
The footage shows the alleged victim telling Rabbi Padwa about someone “who sexually abused me when I was younger, when I was a child and I’m looking for your advice, to be honest, what to do…Would do you think maybe, is it a good idea to speak to the police about it?”.

“Oh no,” Padwa answers, explaining that doing so would breach Rabbinic Law. The alleged victim says that child sex abuse is a “very serious issue”, but is told not tell the police. Rabbi Padwa adds: “Men Tur Nisht,” which is Yiddish for “people must not tell tales.” He continues: “The police is not the solution.”

Another Charedi Rabbi claims later in the program that Rabbi Ephraim Padwa recently forbade a father who had told the police that his son had been sexually abused from pursuing the case.
The man taped speaking to Rabbi Padwa agreed to help investigate possible sex abuse cover-ups after claiming he was abused as a child by a fellow Charedi, Channel 4 claims.

Rabbi Padwa’s organisation, the UOHC, sent Channel 4 a letter responding to the allegations stating: “The Jewish Community considers the safety and protection of our children as paramount.”
Last night it released another statement outlining its procedures for dealing with child sex abuse complaints. It said: “The Orthodox Hebrew Congregations have a special Committee to deal with incidences of attacks of this kind on the children of our congregations. The members of the Committee consist of rabbis, educators and members of the community, among whom there are those who have been trained in the right way to tackle this.

It added: “The Committee which will deal with it [sex abuse complaints] according to the advice of the Rabbinical Court and according to the law of the land.”

[Daily Star] "... One
of these losers is the Syrian people, who are decidedly unenthusiastic about
seeing Israel enter into the
uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad in any way,
shape or form. The other losers would be neighboring states such as Lebanon, if
it is swept up into the violence because of the possible – and not yet proven –
role of Hezbollah in the affair...."

[CBS] "...According to
the State Department, however, the U.S. can't confirm whether or not "the poor
little monkey" ever actually made it into orbit."I saw the monkey - the pictures of the poor little
monkey preparing to go to space," said Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman for the State
Department, when asked about "extraterrestrial primates." "We don't have any way
to confirm this one way or the other with regard to the
primate." ..."

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Jan. 30 once again made comments comparing the Republican People’s Party (CHP) to the Syrian Baath Party. One can only assume that by uttering such a reference to Turkey’s main opposition party, Erdogan hopes the public will believe that the CHP supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and is, like Assad’s Baath Party, incapacitated and unconcerned about its own people.The civil war next door is about Syrians killing each other — not a conflict between Turkey and Syria — but it has spawned a domestic battle in Ankara. Surely Turkey would have kept its borders open for people fleeing to safety regardless of the party in power in Ankara. In addition, the compassion that Erdogan espouses toward the Syrian people on behalf of the Turkish nation is that of all Turks, including those in opposition. Thus, the problem between Erdogan and the CHP likely stems from the prime minister’s displeasure with opposition accusations that his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is either helping the armed opposition in the Syrian refugee camps in Turkey or is, at the least, turning a blind eye.Although the Erdogan government has adopted a negative tone toward the political opposition and the international community, for its seeming indifference to the carnage in Syria, there is no clear path to altering the current state of affairs. Out of frustration, Erdogan thus may think that verbal assaults against the CHP will help in creating the impression domestically that the AKP’s Syria policy has been the right one all along — first, when it established close relations with Assad, and later, after the outbreak of rebellion when it called for Assad to step down and sided with the Syrian people. In addition, Erdogan does not mind highlighting that neither the CHP nor anyone else has offered a solution for halting the conflict.Until 1998, when Syria expelled Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, Turkish-Syrian relations had been limited. A few years later, the opposition expressed the criticism that Erdogan was getting too close, too quickly to the untested Assad, who took power in 2000, and that such rapidly developing relationships usually have the potential to go off course. The opposition repeatedly stated that they did not oppose abolishing visas or developing trade ties with Syria, but that regardless of who controlled the Turkish government, such steps should be taken only gradually.

What is the current dilemma for Turkey’s Syria policy? There is a deadly stalemate on Turkey’s border and no reason to expect a turn for the better any time soon. Not only has a modern-day Turkish government for the first time declared its desire to topple another country’s regime, it has also made it policy. Turkey’s opposition has argued that this approach consigns Syria to never-ending violence.Western diplomats in Ankara have told Al-Monitor that they are confused by Ankara’s accusatory rhetoric and unrealistic proposals. The consensus within the diplomatic community is that no end game currently exists and that it would be misleading to raise expectations of any sort of military intervention.Diplomatic sources also questioned Turkey’s proposal to establish a no-fly zone, which has proven to be impractical. Referring to the long-running no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, they noted that that action followed the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1991 and thus Iraq’s air radar system had been demolished long before Washington asked the UN Security Council for authority to establish the zones.Furthermore, it is well known that Russia would be an obstacle to a no-fly zone, claiming to be driven by the principled position of protecting a country’s sovereignty and therefore using its veto to prohibit military interventions involving domestic unrest in states friendly with Moscow. The only time Russia has acted differently involved taking action in Libya, when it abstained to clear the way for NATO intervention to help bring down the regime of Moammar Gadhafi. It is clear that the Turkish opposition has had no voice in shaping foreign policy for the decade that the Erdogan government has held power, but with the Syrian mess apparently destined to drag on, Erdogan appears to be playing a preemptive blame game by attacking the domestic opposition and the international community.“Syrian factions are getting cross-border support from neighboring countries,” peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was quoted as telling members of the Security Council on Jan. 29 at a closed-door meeting. “Syria is becoming a playground for competing forces. None of the neighbors is immune to the fallout consequences of the conflict.” Of course, it was AKP’s policy, not the CHP’s, to approve weapons transfers to the Syrian opposition across Turkey’s borders. In the current light, maybe it would have been better not to have armed the opposition in the first place, though the point is irrelevant to saving lives in Syria today.If the international community fully arms the Syrian opposition, it remains unclear whether it will help to build a democratic and free Syria. Once the civil war crosses the border into Turkey, the region will sink deeper in the morass, possibly pushing one of the region’s most resilient economies seriously off track.

* They had a man with a
British passport living in Djakarta, for example, working under cover. That
meant the Indonesian government knew he was with the Mossad. He had an escape
route ready, and a gold coin belt if he needed it, among other security
measures. His main task was to facilitate arms sales in the region. They also
had a man in Japan, one in India, one in Africa, and occasionally, people in Sri
Lanka, and in Malaysia.* At the same time, Yaar and
company were supplying the warring Tamils with anti-PT boat equipment to use in fighting the
government forces. The Israelis also trained elite forces for both sides,
without either side knowing about the other, and helped Sri Lanka cheat the
World Bank and other investors out of millions of dollars to pay for all the
arms they were buying from them.* But Israel doesn't have
a station in Damascus. They don't understand that the Mossad regards the whole
world outside Israel as a target, including Europe and the United States. Most
of the Arab countries don't manufacture their own weapons. Most don't have
high-level military colleges, for example. If you want to recruit a Syrian
diplomat, you don't have to do that in Damascus. You can do it in Paris. If you
want data on an Arab missile, you get that in Paris or London or the United
States where it is made. You can get less information on Saudi Arabia from the
Saudis themselves than you can from the Americans.* We
would allow so many Iraqi and Iranian ships to pass, but anything beyond that
and we'd make sure the other side was notified and the ship targeted. That way
we could keep the war hot. And if they were busy fighting each other, they
couldn't fight us.* One of my assignments, in mid-July
1984, was to escort a group of Indian nuclear scientists who were worried about
the threat of the Islamic bomb (Pakistan's bomb) and had
come on a secret mission to Israel to meet with Israeli nuclear experts and
exchange information.* Many Sri Lankan Tamils, escaping
the bloodshed, have sought refuge there, and the Sri Lankan government has
accused Indian officials of arming and training the Tamils. They should be
accusing the Mossad. The Tamils were training at the commando naval base,
learning penetration techniques, mining landings, communications, and how to
sabotage ships similar to the Devora.* It was initially
disguised as a textile factory, then a "pumping station," until the CIA obtained
photographic evidence from a U-2 flight in December
1960 that it housed a nuclear reactor. There was also a much smaller reactor
called KAMG (the abbreviation for Kure Gamy Le Machkar, or Nuclear Research
Facility) in Nahal Sorek, inside an
air-force base just south of Tel Aviv. I visited both plants. After its secret
got out in 1960, David Ben-Gurion formally announced Israel's "peaceful" atomic
project, though much of it remains anything but peaceful.*
On July 21, 1973, the Mossad killed the innocent waiter. Three people went to
jail. One of them, David Arbel, talked a lot, and the "Lillehammer affair" became perhaps the
biggest scandal and embarrassment in Mossad history.* At
that time, the head of Italian intelligence was very close to the Mossad. In
fact, the Italian, carrying a concealed camera, used to travel to Arab countries
and photograph Arab military installations for the
Mossad.* The best bet, then, was Chile. As it happened,
that country had just placed a request with Israel for training a domestic
security service — something in which Israel's special expertise is well known.
Israel may not brag openly about it, but it has trained such diverse units as
Iran's dreaded Savak, security forces in Colombia, Argentina,
West Germany, South Africa, and in several other African countries, including
former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's secret police.
Israel also trained the secret police of recently deposed Panamanian strongman
Manuel Noriega. In fact, Noriega, who trained
personally in Israel, always wore the Israeli paratrooper wings on the right
side of his military uniform (they are normally worn on the left). And just to
show how nondiscriminatory the Mossad is, it trained both sides in the bloody
ongoing civil unrest in Sri Lanka: the Tamils and the Sinhalese, as well as the
Indians who were sent in to restore order.

* He was forwarding a
request from "Purple A," the code name for the Danish Civil Security
Service(DCSS), for a check to be run on a list of about 40 people
with Arabic names and/or backgrounds applying for visas either to visit Denmark
or to move there. What the Danish public does not know — and only a few Danish
government officials do know — is that the Mossad routinely checks all these
applications on Denmark's behalf, putting a checkmark next to the name on a copy
of the Danish visa application if there is no problem with the applicant. When
there is a problem, they either tell the Danes or, if it's to Israel's
advantage, hold back the application for further study. The relationship between
the Mossad and Danish intelligence is so intimate as to be indecent. But it's
not the Mossad's virtue that is compromised by the arrangement; it's Denmark's.
And that's because the Danish are under the mistaken impression that because
they saved a lot of Jews in World War II, the Israelis are grateful and they can
trust the Mossad.

* For the Mossad, the most important player in all of
this was a man named Durak Kasim, Arafat's driver and personal bodyguard and
member of Force 17. Kasim had been recruited as a Mossad agent in 1977 when he
was studying philosophy in England. A greedy man, he was reporting to them
almost daily, sending messages through a burst radio communications system,
receiving $2,000 a report. He also telephoned information and mailed it
periodically, and once even showed up at the "submarine" — the Mossad's
underground station in Beirut — a reckless thing to do, and a rude shock to his
operator that Kasim would know the address. During the siege of Beirut, Kasim
was actually with Arafat, reporting to the Mossad from inside PLO headquarters.
Kasim was Arafat's closest personal aide. He was the one who
helped find boys for Arafat. Certainly homosexuality is against Islamic beliefs,
but given the way of life, it's not that uncommon. It's not as badly regarded as
it is in the West. The Mossad didn't actually have any proof to support the
claim that Arafat liked teenage boys. They had no photos, nothing. It could have
been just another way to discredit Arafat; they did that with many other Arab
leaders, saying how they lived the good life by skimming off the system. But
they couldn't say that about Arafat. He actually lives a humble life, with his
people. During the siege of Beirut he had many opportunities to escape but he
didn't leave until he got his people out, so the Mossad can't claim that he
operates out of self-interest, either. Perhaps they used the story about him
liking teenage boys as a substitute.

* When Jonathan J. Pollard, 31, and his wife, Anne
Henderson-Pollard, 25, were arrested in late November 1985, after a failed
attempt to gain asylum at the Israeli embassy in Washington, the predictable
political fall-out focused attention for a time on an embarrassing and explosive
question: does the Mossad actively operate in the United States? Officially, the
Mossad says no, no, a thousand times no. Absolutely not. Indeed, Mossad katsas are forbidden even to carry
phony U.S. passports or use U.S. covers in their work, so delicate is the
situation between the state of Israel and its largest and most influential
supporter. * In the midst of all this, the Mossad had made
its first contact with the opium growers in Thailand. The Americans were trying
to force farmers to stop producing opium and grow coffee instead. The Mossad's
idea was to get in there, help them grow coffee, but at the same time help them
export opium as a means of raising money for Mossad
operations.* With the exception of Canada and most of the
United States, Jewish communities outside Israel have frames, trained and armed,
ready to defend themselves if needed.* For the Israeli
soldiers, their stay in Lebanon wasn't all war; they'd found a convenient way to
make love at the same time in a village just outside Beirut. The place was
noteworthy for two things: its beautiful women, and their absent
husbands.* Perhaps the best illustration of the prevailing
mood of the right wing in Israel is the celebrated case of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, leader of the far-right
Jewish Settlers' Movement. In June 1990, he was sentenced to six months in jail
for negligence: he had shot and killed an Arab.

The Head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili, was expected in Damascus on Saturday for a
meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, Agence France Presse quoted security
officials as saying.

Jalili would also meet with Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi and Foreign
Minister Walid al-Muallem, the officials told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Jalili, who last visited Damascus in August 2012, is also Iran's top nuclear
negotiator and a close aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei.

His visit was also confirmed by Al-Alam television channel, which reported
that the trip would be important-- although it did not elaborate.

The vivist comes few days after the Zionist entity launched an airstrike
against a scientific research center situated between Damascus and the Lebanese
border, killing two people and injuring five others.

River toSeaUprooted PalestinianThe views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Yesterday, 26th of January, I attended the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign AGM in London. On entry, I was asked if I was a member and I replied that I wasn’t, but that I was a Palestinian journalist and would like to attend the meeting as an observer. I was given a package and a yellow badge.

However, a few hours later, during the lunch break, while standing in a queue in the cafeteria, I was approached by PSC Vice-Chair Kamel Hawash who again asked if I was a member. I confirmed that I wasn’t, but that I had been granted observer status. Hawash replied that I wasn’t supposed to be there and that I must leave.

I am left perplexed. How can an organisation that claims to lobby on behalf of the Palestinians expel a Palestinian from its annual gathering? I am afraid that, yet again, we are furnished with clear proof that the PSC is now under full Zionist control and that this group is serves now just as a mouthpiece for the British establishment and the Zionist lobby.

Regrettably, the PSC in the U.K. now has very little to do with the Palestinian plight or the Palestinian people.

Yours sincerely

Sammi IbraemAn exiled Palestinian journalist

River toSeaUprooted PalestinianThe views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Syria is not a war caused by 'rebels' within the country just as the Libya 'revolution' was not.

They are part of a systematic fake 'Arab Spring' takeover of the whole of Africa and the Middle and Near East by forces working through the United States, Israel and NATO (all the same thing if you go high enough or deep enough).

I have been exposing this plan in my books for years and what is now happening in Mali and planned for country after country in Africa orchestrated through the US AFRICOM network is all part of this.

Watch out South Africa because they want you, too. They want everything because they are insane.

They manufacture a different excuse for each new country although with Libya and Syria it was exactly the same.

'Rebels' funded and armed by the US and NATO (via Qatar) start attacking government targets and when the government returns fire the forces behind the 'rebels' scream through their compliant and ignorant media 'Gadhafi/Assad is killing his own people'.

They then use this 'humanitarian' excuse to send the boys in to slaughter the innocent and steal oil reserves and other assets.

They did this in Libya and they have been desperate to do this in Syria but it has not been as easy as they thought and so they planned to covertly arrange a chemical attack so they could say 'we have to send in NATO to stop Assad killing his own people with chemical weapons'.

No wonder the Daily Mail article has been removed so quickly. When their game is exposed they lose their cover stories.

River toSeaUprooted PalestinianThe views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, Liberal Democrats David Ward, MP for Bradford East made a comparison on his website. He equated the Shoa with the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But in Britain 2013, we are not supposed to think freely, we are advised not to follow our ethical intuitions or even to think historically or critically. The Liberal Democrats already "condemned" Ward for his "use of language."
Here is what Ward wrote:

Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.

Under pressure he later issued a statement in which he attempted to "clarify" this:

The Holocaust was one of the worst examples in history of man’s inhumanity to man. When faced with examples of atrocious behaviour, we must learn from them. It appears that the suffering by the Jews has not transformed their views on how others should be treated.

Time is ripe for our liberation..

River toSeaUprooted PalestinianThe views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

The total blackout the Irish struggle has been subject to seems to have no par and maybe due to the fact that Great Britain and its allies holds the major keys to world media . Since we were at school we were never told the truth , we were given lies about a struggle being a religious one between two sects of Christianity -Catholics and Protestants- like the struggle activated now between Sunnis and Shi’as . - I remember that – as pupils- we wondered to what avail and over what were Catholics and Protestants fighting in Ireland ? And if so why weren’t they fighting everywhere else and why isn’t the Catholic Church or the Vatican involved ? Dissatisfied by the evasive answers of the teacher we would ask more about the matter to receive the same response. Finally I think we gave up and ended up telling ourselves that Ireland must be a place- like Lebanon - where multiple religions were source of trouble .

We thought Ireland was England or part of England. We didn’t know that it was a country and a people and a culture and even a religion standing by itself, that it was just a neighboring country to Britain speaking an altogether different language. We did not know that Ireland was under occupation, that it had been invaded by the British the same way Egypt or Jordan or Palestine were invaded and occupied. What we learned also is that not only Ireland was invaded and occupied by its harmful neighbor but was- as well- colonized- with settlements built and settlers coming in from outside to settle and exploit the land and build plantations on usurped territories that belonged to the Irish people. In fact Ireland was a British province the same way Algeria was a French province under French colonization.

Until now the British colonization of Ireland constitutes a great surprise to us and the question arises that : if the British colonized us - Arabs- or colonized Indians who were strangers to them, why -on earth- did they colonize their own neighbors with whom they shared so much ? We still have not found an answer to this question , but it seems that predator nations will not refrain from doing so and from preying on whatever is accessible - be it close or far. They will oppress and exploit and kill their own kith and kin if necessary. This feature applies to Spain –as well – since the first thing the Spaniards did- before sailing to colonize the world -was to invade their neighbors like Catalans and Basques - and subdue them to their own oppressive rule from which- both Catalans and Basques- are still suffering.

After all this, seeing what England did to Ireland, one wonders why people were so shocked when Adolph Hitler caressed the dream of invading his neighbors and expanding his rule to the rest of Europe . He must have been greatly inspired by both Britain and Spain who preceded him along this line.

No doubt Ireland constituted a great experimental field for the British crown to experiment all kinds of oppressive measures and abusive steps and all kinds of repressive policies that will be used overseas to oppress other peoples and subdue other nations . That is why , when the English Puritans sailed to the New continent at the beginning of the seventeenth century , they had mastered many of the means of subjugation of other nations . Like the British , they usurped the land , built settlements , waged war on the Natives chasing them out of their territories, enslaving them and starving them and exterminating them, committing every single violation towards those who welcomed them and greeted them and fed them when they were hungry and taught them how to plant the seeds and work the land. One can even say that the destruction of the potato crop that lead to the starvation of almost one million Irish in year 1840 and to the exile of another million, inspired the settlers of the new continent to exterminate the white buffalo in order to starve the Natives who relied greatly on this animal .

So many parallels can be drawn between the abuses of the British in Ireland and that of the Puritan pilgrims of the new continent, the least of them being the demonization of their enemies picturing them as savage unruly evil creatures that needed to be exterminated for the betterment of humanity. This demonization is still the weapon used in many instances by the imperialists to wage war on poor countries and expose populations and cultures calling for their extermination and cultural extinction by depriving them of their evil traditions and evil language and heretic religious practices .

The policies of religious conflict and partition and division and setting part of the population against the other and creating civil wars and local conflicts- as has been carried on in Ireland for centuries- bore its fruits in all the British colonies of the British empire . In India , in the Arab and Muslim world, the policy of divide and conquer perpetrated the rule of the colonialist enemy even after he evacuated the land. In the Arab Nation, it created Israel on Palestinian land . In India, it created Pakistan and Kashmir . In Iraq it created sectarian warfare and ethnical enmities and so many other irresolvable conflicts that are not restricted to a place or area . It killed and is still killing and the crime of the Irish people, like the crime of the Native Indigenous , like that of the Palestinians , was to resist and to refuse to be subdued and their nation subjugated .

If one resists occupation and exploitation and abuse and violation and partition and acculturation, one becomes subject to extermination. This is the rule of the British Crown and the rule of its off Springs : Israel and Uncle Sam , and the rule of the European predators who preyed on their neighbors before preying on us . Long live the Struggle of the people , of all people who are facing the predators by all means. And the Irish people have been resisting for so long , alone , only relying on themselves , not betting on any external help or world solidarity or international support . People who sacrificed so much cannot be denied freedom and inborn rights. Long live Ireland ! Long live Iran! Long live Syria ! Long live Iraq! Long live Lebanon and Palestine! The predator monsters will be defeated for sure , they have been defeated already ! The administration of this world will change hands and they are doomed and condemned by their own doings !River toSeaUprooted PalestinianThe views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

It has been a while now since former PM Saad Hariri, listed as one of the 100
richest men in the world, started facing silent protests by Future party
employees who haven’t been receiving any salaries.
Al-Akhbar daily reported Friday that Hariri seems to be
overcoming his crisis, as he recently paid his debts, according to sources in
the party.

However, the paper pointed out that this partial financial relief was limited
to the party and its employees, as Hariri have not yet paid the debts he have in
his political work and business.

“The evidence,” Al-Akhbar revealed, “is a lawsuit in the Lebanese judiciary
by a Jordanian transportation agency against Saad Hariri.”

“This lawsuit is against Hariri in person, and it demands him to pay three
million US dollars to the complainant who says it is the second part of the
money Hariri was supposed to pay for transportation services to passengers from
the Gulf to Lebanon in 2009,” the Lebanese daily added.

“The agreement was that the agency gets paid eight million dollars, but it
only received five million,” Al-Akhbar said, indicating that “the lawsuit also
mentions services that Hariri presented in 2009 to transport Lebanese from
Beirut to participate in the parliamentary elections then, which is also
considered electoral bribery.”

In a similar context, and after wide landed properties for Hariri family in
Lebanon were put on sale, Al-Akhbar knew that Saudi Oger (owned by Saad Hariri
and his brothers) also put a big number of landed properties that it owns in
Saudi Arabia on sale for their need for cash money.

River toSeaUprooted PalestinianThe views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Vatican City - Christians are being driven out of eastern
Libya by Muslim fundamentalists, the Catholic Church's main clergyman in the
country told the Vatican missionary news agency Fides.

The situation was "critical" and the "atmosphere very tense" in the Cyrenaica
region, the Apostolic Vicar of Tripoli Giovanni Innocenzo Martinelli said in the
interview on Thursday.

He said two religious communities are leaving "after being pressured by
fundamentalists", adding that the Apostolic Vicar of Benghazi was cautioned to
take shelter ahead of a large-scale demonstration on 20 February.

"In past days, the Congregation of the Holy Family of Spoleto who had been
there for nearly 100 years were forced to abandon Derna," east of the main
eastern city of Benghazi, he said.

"In Barce [located between Benghazi and Derna] the Franciscan Sisters of the
Child Jesus will leave their home in coming days."

On Friday, Martinelli told Vatican Radio that for some time now
fundamentalism has governed decisions in Libya.

Christians have voiced fear of a rise in sectarian sentiment in the
overwhelmingly Muslim nation following the 2011 revolt that toppled dictator
Muammar Gaddafi and in which hard-line Islamists played a major part.

Before the uprising, 3% of Libya's population of around 6.3 million were
Christian.

Now only a couple thousand of them remain, with the majority of them
expatriates.

In December, two Egyptians died in a blast at a Christian Coptic church in
the Libyan town of Dafniya, and two others were wounded

River toSeaUprooted PalestinianThe views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!